This was in Ukraine about a hundred years ago. An ordinary picturesque Ukrainian village with hardworking residents. A mother and her daughter lived in one hut. They worked on the farm. In those days, to live and not go hungry, you had to work every day and prepare for a harsh winter. Every working day in spring, summer and fall later in winter was rewarded a hundredfold and was the key to survival. Therefore, people worked and tried to get their households ready to meet the cold winter with food supplies. Many households in the village lived without men. Many did not return from World War I and other civil wars. And the women had to do men's hard work as well. Nowadays, in our time, to eat it is enough to spend half an hour, run to the nearest supermarket to buy half-finished products. Warm them up and fill up. Fall satiated under the laptop and belly flop from pleasure, watching Youtube.
One day, as usual, they got up early in the morning with the roosters. At dawn with the first rays of the sun, my mother left the yard, either to work in the fields or to go to the market. The daughter stayed home. Her daughter diligently did her chores and went into the house to warm up the stove for cooking. She chopped some wood and put it in the stove. She lay down by the stove to rest for a while while it was heating. And she fell asleep. Her mother comes in and her daughter is lying down. She woke her up, but her daughter wouldn't get up. She listened, and she didn't even feel a pulse. The mother ran and called the neighbors. They came, looked, tried to bring her to her senses - and nothing. There was no sign of life, no breathing, no pulse, no blush on her cheeks. They just threw up their hands, sobbed, and said, "Your daughter must have died. Her mother wept in grief: "What for, people, to be like this! My daughter, so young, died! How will I be alone now?"
People offered their condolences and consolation. But what consolation! And they began to prepare for the funeral. Later, the men noticed that the deceased had inhaled the smoke from the stove and carbon monoxide. In those days, many people had a Georgian-style stove and the smoke came out through the room of the house and right through the doors to the street. There were no chimneys through the roof. Also noticed that my daughter put branches of some tree in the stove, whether cherry or other, which when burning and smoldering very strongly emitted asphyxiating poisonous smoke. She must have inhaled it.
The girl was buried. The people of the village gathered and came to pay their respects. Tables were laid. Her daughter's mother was very tired from the three days of grief and immediately laid down in a corner of the house and fell asleep. She had a dream, and her daughter said to her mother, "Why did you bury me, Mommy? I'm alive, aren't I?" She immediately woke up and told her guests. And she started rushing to the grave to dig up her daughter. People began to hold her back: "What are you, old?! Are you crazy? Fear God! Where to dig a grave! That's a sin." Many thought she'd gone mad with grief. But some men who had seen a lot in their lives agreed to dig up the grave to assuage her tormented soul.
When they dug out the grave and opened it, they saw a terrible sight. Inside the casket was covered with blood. The interior lining of the coffin was all scratched. The dead woman's hands were bloody. Her fingernails were torn off. The face was bloody and scratched. The hair had been pulled out of her head. And the deceased was lying face down. Everyone knew at once that the girl had woken up in the coffin and was desperately trying to get out. With hopelessness, despair and horror, she tore her hair and choked to death.
What happened next, my great-grandmother did not say. The story ended there. But it makes me shiver and dread what her mother felt the moment she saw this horror. That she buried her daughter alive. Not in time... Maybe she blamed herself and thought she was the killer of her own daughter for hurrying up and burying her.
Later I read somewhere that if a man burned with carbon monoxide and fell into a coma, he should be put according to a popular belief on damp earth and lightly covered with earth. The earth has a great natural force and should pull into itself this poisoning, and the man woke up and survived in a few days. Apparently, this effect worked, but only in the grave.
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